To avoid breaking its contract with Google, SDSU’s IT Department reportedly applied a storage quota of 50 gigabytes to all student Google Workspace accounts on Dec. 8. 

This change comes as a result of Google removing its unlimited storage feature for Workplace for Education users in July 2022. 

“The new limit is 50 GB per student, determined after analyzing storage trends at SDSU and reviewing practices at other institutions,” the IT Department said. 

According to SDSU’s IT Department website, students whose storage exceeds the quota will lose the ability to sync or upload new files and to create new files in Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, Forms and Jamboard. They will also lose the ability to edit or copy their files. Furthermore, they won’t be able to add or back up any photos or videos. 

However, affected students can still send and receive emails.

To clear up space, the IT Department says to use a separate, free Google account or a similar service to upload your files. Students interested in purchasing more Google storage can not do so for their school account and must use a personal Google One account. A free Google account allows users to store 15 GB worth of data. Other free services, such as MEGA or Blomp, offer up to 40 GB of storage. 

These services, however, may not be enough to bring students’ data below the quota without payment.

Although the IT Department only reported 19 students with storage exceeding 1 TB, they reported that 621 students exceeded the 50 GB quota and 341 of those students exceeded 100 GB. 

For reference, if a student with 150 GB of storage in their Google Workspace wishes to offload that data to another Google account for free, they would need 7 free accounts to do so. Even if they were to use MEGA or Blomp, that would still require 3 free accounts to offload all of the information. 

Otherwise, students may opt for paid online storage options such as Google One’s premium plan, which offers two TBs of storage for $10 a month or $100 a year. Alternatively, students could purchase a flash drive to store information, though at the expense of data being accessible through the cloud.  

Additionally, according to IT, students who work with a large number of multimedia files, such as audio and video, can make use of Adobe Cloud Documents Storage’s free 300 GB limit for SDSU students. Adobe’s ability to sync with a student’s Google account provides a potential solution for these students.